Hangzhou’s Martin Goya Business turns Shanghai’s Power Station of Art into an eight hour lab of painting, poetry and noise rock, supported by Chanel’s Culture Fund until October 8.
On July 11, Shanghai’s Power Station of Art opened its doors to something closer to a live experiment than a typical museum show. For eight hours straight, 150 artists, dancers, musicians and students activated the space in a performance the collective Martin Goya Business calls a “continuous collective action.”
The event launches Theater, the third installment of the Next Cultural Producer program, a collaboration between Chanel’s Culture Fund and the museum. This year’s winning proposal, titled “Noon, Wildness, Stream, Washe, Ruins, Theatre,” pushes against institutional conventions. Song Dynasty references, crowd-sourced writing, and graffiti collide with video and sound in a deliberately unstable installation.
Martin Goya Business was founded in Hangzhou by artist Cheng Ran, novelist Da Mian, curator Taoph and writer Tan Sin Thiau. The group operates outside the traditional art system, running a hybrid space that shifts from canteen to bar to gallery. In Shanghai, they built a two-story scaffold for rotating live painting. Artists painted over each other’s work across the night, a nod to the group’s history of displacement and rebuilding.
As the show stretched toward midnight, the energy shifted again. A mini-concert by avant-rock band Mola Oddity took over the space, led by former Mandopop star Amber Kuo. Her presence marked a sharp but fitting turn, bridging pop history and experimental sound in the same room.
“We’re interested in how we perceive time, past and present,” Cheng said during an opening weekend panel. “Museums should witness beginnings, not act as final approval.”
The show resists fixed interpretation. One moment a dancer traces the floor, the next a poet types lines into a shared Google Doc projected onto silk. Ten cameras recorded the full opening, generating 1,500 gigabytes of footage that will be edited into a film evolving with the exhibition.
The project draws on the collective’s experience of being pushed to the margins. After multiple relocations due to Hangzhou’s urban growth, the group continues to build spaces for itself and its wider creative community.
The exhibition is free and open through October 8. Chanel’s support, through its Culture Fund, reflects a broader commitment to backing emerging voices across art and performance in Asia.
